Amazon, the world’s largest online book retailer, and HarperCollins, the second-largest of the so-called “big five” publishers in the U.S., have entered into a multiyear contract, avoiding a protracted battle over discounts and pricing. Bloomberg Business quotes Erin Crum, a spokesperson for HarperCollins, as saying, “HarperCollins has reached an agreement with Amazon and our books will continue to be available on the Amazon print and digital platforms.”

Following the Business Insider piece, a post on the Melville House website asked whether Amazon might be preparing to engage in a “doomsday scenario” with HarperCollins, something the blog post suggested would be tantamount to an “apocalyptic development.”

Overheated rhetoric aside, this never seemed like a very plausible scenario. HarperCollins is not Hachette: it has much more leverage over Amazon when negotiating terms. Its stable of authors – including Neil Gaiman, Dennis Lehane, and J.R.R. Tolkien – features big names that Amazon would not want to risk losing access to. Among the big names in HarperCollins’s stable, one looms larger than all the others this season. Harper Lee’s much ballyhooed second novel, Go Set a Watchman, is being published on July 14; there is no way Amazon would risk being the only online retailer in the U.S. not to feature that title.

When Macmillan signed its contract with Amazon last year, CEO John Sargent stated that the retailer accounts for as much as 64 per cent of the publisher’s revenue from ebooks. HarperCollins has obviously taken measures to mitigate this market dominance, and – combined with its size and market clout – these seem to be working. Though with agreements already in place with three other big five publishers (Penguin Random House is now the lone holdout), Amazon had no real incentive not to agree to similar terms with HarperCollins.

Which in a way is disappointing. It would probably have been ugly, but a knock-down, drag-out, no-holds-barred battle between Jeff Bezos and Rupert Murdoch would surely have been entertaining.